There are a number of medical conditions in which systemic cooling is an effective therapy. For example, rapid systemic cooling of stroke and head-trauma patients has significant therapeutic benefits. Stroke is a major cause of death and neurological disability, but recent research has suggested that even though a stroke victim's brain cells may lose their ability to function during the stroke, they do not necessarily die quickly. Brain damage resulting from a stroke may take hours to reach maximum effect. Neurological damage may be limited and the stroke victim's outcome improved if a cooling neuroprotectant therapy is applied during that timeframe.
Similar possibilities exist with the victims of trauma such as may result from vehicle crashes, falls, and the like. Such trauma may cause brain injury through mechanisms that have overlap with elements in the genesis of neurologic damage in stroke victims. Delayed secondary injury at the cellular level after the initial head trauma event is recognized as a major contributing factor to the ultimate tissue loss that occurs after brain injury.
Cooling therapy has been shown in a number of studies to confer neuroprotection in stroke victims and may hasten neurologic recovery. Such cooling therapy may be applied with the use of a medical cooling pad that is placed on the patient. For example, the pad might be placed on the patient's torso and fluid such as water or air circulated through the pad. Thermal energy is then exchanged between the patient and the circulated fluid so that when the temperature of the fluid is lower than the desired temperature of the patient, the patient is cooled.